International SEO: What to do when you're using a ccTLD and want to go global

[ecommercebc]

I'm hoping someone in the Moz community can help me with this one! Essentially, we have a .co.uk brand which wants to have more of an international presence. My question is, purely based on the fact that we're a .co.uk, will we find it more challenging to develop a search engine presence in European/BRIC markets? In a perfect world, we'd have a .com/country or a .es/ etc, but if this isn't possible, how hindered are we if we stick with the .co.uk and want to build a presence in Spain?

[ecommercebc]

Hi Jimmy,

Great to hear from you. My initial reaction is that it might be trickier to rank with the .co.uk, as well. Context wise, I hope this helps... this would be for a B2B website that sells into various countries, including the likes of Spain, Italy, Germany, as well as China, Vietnam, Thailand and more.

Primarily we'd be looking to rank for our brand name in various different languages, e.g. simplified Chinese, Thai, German, all from a .co.uk.

My initial suspicion is that a .co.uk may be trickier than getting a .com or country specific TLDs ranking (e.g. brandname.cn brandname.de), especially with Baidu which doesn't seem to have a lot of love for .co.uks.

Based on this, would you stick with .co.uk, go global with a .com or country specific with ccTLDs for each target market?

Holly

[robmarsden]

Hi Holly,

I think you might struggle with the .co.uk to be honest - in theory, getting links from spanish websites will help, however you would have to ask yourself why someone would link to your UK site from a local one. To help you further I'd need to understand a little more. Can you give more context to the situation? Also, are you trying to rank for English or Spanish queries in Spain?

Jimmy

[ecommercebc]

That's super helpful, thank you. American markets aside, are there any other countries where it would be a hindrance?

[SwimsuitsDirect.com]

Its not as much of a hindrance in other European countries as it would be if you're trying to expand into American markets. Not having that country's TLD does hurt your SEO in that country somewhat but the way to get around this is to work on getting links from websites in that country. If you can get the domain great, if not it's not the end of the world.